How to Track your Engaging Posts in Google Analytics

By Sean

I’m pretty sure that you’re getting a good number of users pouring in to your website. The real question is, how many people really do read your stuff? How many of your users actually go through your webpages and take time to understand what you’re talking about? How do you track that with Google Analytics?

There is a very simple way to measure out your engaged users. Time. The more time they spend on your pages, the more likely they are engaged with your content. For this entry, this is how we are going to measure out your engaged users – for whatever reason they are spending their precious time with in your website.

Some helpful website facts for you in determining your Visit Duration goal:

Step 4: Voila! You can check out which of your pages are engaging users! I usually set this to a daily check so that I can view the data in micro-perspective.

Determining the Ratio

The great thing about getting this data is you can compare it with the total number of visits that you got that day. This will give you a good look of the percentage of your readers that are really engaged with your stuff!

For example: If I have a data 300 of initially engaged users (1 minute Visit Duration) and I compare it with the 3,000 total visitors I got in that same time-span, I have a ratio of 10% initially engaged users. Increasing this ratio on a monthly basis should be a webmaster’s goal.

How do you Improve User Engagement?

The real question is, where to begin? There are SO MANY THINGS you can do to improve your user’s Visit Duration:

Now imagine having your users spend that much time with your website JUST FOR YOUR DESIGN. But you’re much more than just design, aren’t you?

Content

Content is an excellent way to engage your users. Having the right content that people are looking for should already spell out ‘engagement’. People spend time reading or watching information they want. It doesn’t have to be an extensive piece of content such as this Youtube SEO post. It can come in the form of a compilation – some short, bite-sized posts like our Content Strategy Tutorial series.

Functionality

Sometimes people are looking for something interactive or perhaps for a tool to help them out. Having any of these in your website can increase user engagement. Imagine how much time people burn in playing online games – whether it’s in Facebook or it’s in a website like Newgrounds.com

Call to Action

After every post, give your users a suggestive action – something that would benefit them. It could be giving them a free e-book, webinar, or other sources of information in your website. Sometimes if you don’t suggest, people simply get up and leave. You have to take the lead. Guide your users into what you want them to do.

Tips for Keeps: Set-up your User Engagement metric. It’s easy, simple and it gives you a good idea in how well your website is retaining its users.

This is the first blog of yours I have read about Google analytic’s I will be going back to read the rest today. I have been busy rewriting content on my website to focus more on the benefits of my service instead of the features and that brings me to my question. My avg Session Time for some pages are as high as 6.26 seconds with about 27% bounce rate. I think the reason the average session time is so high is because its me on the website idling on that page while re-writing the code in notepad on the other screen throwing the results off. Is it possible to make it only track unique visitors or new visitors?